Thoughts on hacking finance

I too thought there must be opportunities in "disrupting" finance. Then I realized people "want" to be taken advantage of. Of course, not literally. But in a weird sense, people do not want to take responsibility for their finances. Instead they prefer to have someone to blame whom they can replace when things go bad. It seems easier on their ego to say "I trusted the wrong guy" than to say "I was wrong". Of course, that gets exploited by the snakes. This basic mechanism (abrogate intellectual responsibility and substitute (blind?) trust for -- questionable and contradictory -- domain knowledge(s)) is very robust over cycles and will make it very, very hard if not impossible to disrupt the financial industry. Another factor is that for most people, at least in Europe and Asia, money is not a polite subject to obsess about. Instead, it would be easier for people to, again, just have a person who makes them feel good and trust things are in "good hands". Again, in a weird sense, they don't actually want to know all that much detail about what's happening with their money. Easier to say, I gave it to this guy at such-and-such brandname institution and how can that be wrong. Maybe I'm just too stupid to see a way around this. The fact is, though, that all these attempts to give investors/customers more power seem to go nowhere or remain insignificant. There is a reason for that and I think it's not an issue of making it easier. It's a question of do they really want what they say they want?

I like the ideas, but terribly written.

One of the sites he mentioned in there, covestor, seems pretty interesting in how it links to an investor's actual trading account to track his record. To me, that makes a lot more sense than following a financial adviser's advice to buy something they don't even own.